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An Afghan Comes Home to a Massacre

Abdul Samad, an Afghan who had 11 relatives killed in a massacre, expressed his outrage to President Hamid Karzai.Credit
Anzala Khilji

PANJWAI, Afghanistan — Displaced by the war, Abdul Samad finally moved his large family back home to this volatile district of southern Afghanistan last year. He feared the Taliban, but his new house was nestled near an American military base, where he considered himself safe.

But when Mr. Samad, 60, walked into his mud-walled dwelling here on Sunday morning and found 11 of his relatives sprawled in all directions, shot in the head, stabbed and burned, he learned the culprit was not a Taliban insurgent. The shooting suspect was a 38-year-old United States staff sergeant who had slipped out of the base to kill.

The American soldier is accused of killing 16 people in all in a bloody rampage that has further tarnished Afghan-American relations and devastated Mr. Samad, a respected village elder whose tired eyes poured forth tears one minute and glared ahead in anger the next.

Once a believer in the offensive against the Taliban, he is now insistent that the Americans get out. “I don’t know why they killed them,” said Mr. Samad, a short, feeble man with a white beard and white turban, as he struggled in an interview to come to terms with the loss of his wife, four daughters between the ages of 2 and 6, four sons between 8 and 12, and two other relatives.

“Our government told us to come back to the village, and then they let the Americans kill us,” Mr. Samad said outside the military base, known as Camp Belambay, with outraged villagers who came to support him. They transported the bodies of Mr. Samad’s family members, as well as the other victims, and the burned blankets that had covered them as proof of the awful crime that had occurred.

After years of war, Mr. Samad, a poor farmer, had been reluctant to return to his home in Panjwai, which was known in good times for its grapes and mulberries.

But unlike other displaced villagers who stayed in the city of Kandahar, about 15 miles away, and other places around the troubled province, Mr. Samad listened to the urgings of the provincial governor and the Afghan Army. They had encouraged residents to return and reassured them that American forces would protect them.

Photo

Men showed bloodstains and ashes in a house in Panjwai, Afghanistan, where, they said, civilians were killed and burned on Sunday by an American soldier.Credit
Allauddin Khan/Associated Press

Back in his village, a collection of a few houses known as Najibian, Mr. Samad and his family moved into a neighbor’s house because his own had been destroyed by NATO bombardments in the years of fierce battles.

His home in Panjwai and the other districts around Kandahar city — long the Taliban’s heartland — had been a main hub of mujahedeen during the Soviet occupation. The districts became ground zero for the surge of force ordered at the end of 2009 by the Obama administration.

There had been little to no coalition presence in the area in the decade since the war began, and American soldiers fought hard over the past two years to clear Taliban fighters from the mud villages like Mr. Samad’s that dot the area.

At the same time, they struggled to win the trust of the Afghans who live in the district, many of whom have proved wary of foreigners and fearful that the Taliban — who were pushed to the margins in many areas but still remained a forceful presence — would eventually return and extract a heavy toll from those who cooperated with the Americans. Some American actions in the area also alienated villagers, like the wholesale destruction of villages that commanders decided were too riddled with booby traps to safely control.

While the Taliban were pushed back for a while, villagers like Mr. Samad say they are still active and describe what an intolerable life caught between the coalition forces and the Taliban while their meager vineyards and wheat fields are consumed.

“Taliban are attacking the bases, planting mines, and the bases are firing mortars and shooting indiscriminately toward the villages when they come under attack,” said Malak Muhammad Mama, 50, a villager who now lives in Kandahar. He said that a month ago, a mortar fired from the base killed a woman, and that last week a roadside bomb hit an American armored vehicle.

It was against this background that, United States officials said, the soldier left the American base and walked south about a mile to Mr. Samad’s village. Mr. Samad and his teenage son survived because they had been visiting the nearby town of Spinbaldak. When he reached his home, neighbors were putting out the fire set on his family. One of his neighbors, an elderly woman named Anar Gula, who had been cowering in her home, said she had heard an explosion, screaming and shooting as the soldier broke down the door of Mr. Samad’s house and chased his wife and two other female family members from room to room before he shot them.

Two of the women and some of the children had been stabbed, she and other villagers said, and blankets had been laid over them and set alight — to hide the stab wounds, she said.

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Afghan border police officers walked to the Samad home, with village elders. American and Afghan officials are investigating the killings for which an American staff sergeant is blamed.Credit
Anzala Khilji

Afterward, the soldier circled back north around the base to another village, where he attacked the home of Hajji-Sayed Jan, 45, a poor laborer who had fled to Kandahar city three times during the years of fighting but who had brought his family back because he could not afford to live in the city, villagers said.

He was in Kandahar for the evening and so survived, but his wife, nephew, grandson and brother were killed. Further on in the same village, the soldier entered a home and fatally shot Muhammad Dawoud, 55, a farmer, when he emerged from a room; his wife and children escaped to a neighbor’s house.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said Monday that the staff sergeant returned to the base after the killings “and basically turned himself in, told individuals what had happened.” Asked if the soldier had confessed, Mr. Panetta replied, “I suspect that was the case.”

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Mr. Panetta, who spoke to reporters on his plane en route to Kyrgyzstan, said that it was an Afghan soldier at the base who first noticed that the sergeant was missing. “He reported it, they did a bed check, they had prepared a search team to go out and try to find out where he was when they got news of what had happened, and this individual then turned himself in,” he said.

The military would bring “appropriate charges” against the soldier, Mr. Panetta said, and the death penalty “could be a consideration.”

He said the military was still struggling to understand a motive. “We’re not sure why, what the reasons were,” he said. But he called the killings “a criminal act” and said that he had assured President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan that the soldier “will be brought to justice and be held accountable.”

The soldier, who started his first tour in Afghanistan in December after three tours in Iraq, had been trained as a sniper and suffered a head injury in a noncombat-related vehicle accident during a recent tour of duty in Iraq, according to The Associated Press, which cited United States officials who spoke only on the condition of anonymity. One official said there was no information on whether the head injury could be linked to any later abnormal behavior, The A.P. reported.

A Congressional source told The A.P. that the soldier was attached to a village stability program in Belambi, a half-mile from where one attack took place.

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The killings on Sunday took place in the Panjwai district.Credit
The New York Times

Local elders and members of the provincial council gathered in Kandahar on Monday to condemn the attacks, denounce their poor living conditions and question the value of the American troop presence.

But while the mood in the south and in the capital, Kabul, was tense, there was less of the outright fury that brought thousands onto the streets after Koran burnings last month.

The Taliban posted some gory photographs from the attack on their Web site, and photographs of the charred children circulated on many Afghan blogs and social networks, along with enraged anti-American comments. In Kabul, Parliament issued a statement saying its patience with the coalition forces was wearing thin. About 10 deputies from Kandahar walked out in protest of the killings.

“We urge the United States government to punish the culprits and put them on trial in an open court so that the rest of those who want to shed our innocent people’s blood take a lesson from it,” the statement said.

Many Afghans, including Mr. Samad, continued to doubt that the attack was the work of a single gunman, as the military said. Several of the villagers in Panjwai said they had seen more than one soldier, as well as helicopters, suggesting that it was an intentional coordinated attack.

However, in Kabul, senior American diplomats said in private meetings with other allied officials what they have been insisting in public: that the shootings were carried out by a single assailant who was now in the custody of United States forces, according to American officials privy to the conversations. They said helicopters were sent out after the attack to ferry at least five wounded people from the villages to a NATO military hospital.

As for Mr. Samad, he said he was in too much despair to even think about how he would carry on with his life. But he said the lesson of the deadly shootings was clear: the Americans should leave. Mr. Karzai called Mr. Samad on Sunday after the killings, and Mr. Samad, barefoot as he spoke plaintively into a satellite phone with district officials gathered around, told the president: “Either finish us or get rid of the Americans.”